Antiquiet: How much of yourself did you put into the lyrics?
Billy Howerdel: If there’s a story to a song, a lot of times I took something that might be emotionally charging me, and what I would say, or if there’s a misunderstanding and someone had the wrong idea behind your intentions, I kind of ran with that. Even if it was in a sarcastic way, just running with that theme. I wrote Enemies from the point of view of a friend of mine that I haven’t talked to in twenty years, what that guy would think coming back seeing old friends of his and not letting them let go of the past. There’s kind of a recurring theme of people never letting you change. You get a couple fresh starts in life, and one of ‘em is graduating high school, moving on going to college or whatever you’re going to do. You can change your name if you want to, cut your hair, but if you go back and revisit those old places, the past doesn’t forget about you. You can have some shit resurface that you thought you’d lived down. I pretty much wrote it from the story of Frankenstein, as well as this guy that I grew up with. (laughs) But every line in that song is a conversation that I’ve had with somebody else…

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of shitty hip-hop. The devolving trends of recycled misogyny and cartoonish, ridiculous materialism in hip-hop that fuel a crumbling industry have kept me from doing anything more than ride the ’seek’ button through the radio waves for years. There is a nearly-untapped world of quality hip-hop in the “underground” scene, a place where assertive, socially conscious rhymes meet diverse musical influence. It’s a place that deserves a hell of a lot more attention than it gets.
Crown City Rockers are among the best and brightest of today’s hip-hop scene, bringing a melting pot of soul, funk-laced grooves and old-school inflected rhymes to the table. 5 Gold Stars, their follow up to 2004’s Earthtones, is due to hit later this year. We caught up with Crown City MC Raashan Ahmad to discuss Crown City, his solo project The Push (out May 20th), and the inconvenience of revolution.

Billy Howerdel started out behind the scenes in the music business, doing guitar tech work for everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Guns ‘N’ Roses over the years. He stepped into the spotlight in 1999 with A Perfect Circle, a band he founded with Maynard James Keenan of Tool. Eight years and two platinum albums later (three, if you count the remix CD), APC is on indefinite hiatus and Billy has returned with Ashes Divide, a new band with a new album, Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright. As chief songwriter, producer and vocalist for Ashes Divide, Billy’s both the brains and the brawn of the project. “The Stone,” the first single off Ashes Divide’s debut album, hit radio in late January to critical acclaim. Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright drops April 8, 2008.
We go back a little ways with Billy from the APC days, back when Skwerl and I were wee little fanboys running a fansite for APC. Well, actually, I didn’t run shit- I just wrote things down. But they were good years, and it was fun to play catch-up and take a long look back at the path of fallen dominoes- as well as the road ahead.

I woke up this morning to a bit of a tizzy on the internet. This is not to say that today was out of the ordinary, but it got me thinking…

Wait, can my posts be pink? I only write in pink. No? How about the headers? Links? SOMETHING? Thanks. [We'll look into it. -Ed.]

Maureen Dowd, resident firecrotch (I mean that in the nicest way possible, really) at the New York Times, apparently started some sort of shitshow. Dowd’s article, Duel Of Historical Guilts, contains some stuff about shoulder pads and feminism as if the two are related in some way other than that they are both outdated trends from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And that’s just where she begins!

Wandering around the internet today, I came across something I wish I had seen 2 months ago: This interview Josh Homme did with SF Weekly, where they ask him about this scorching interview we did with him in December. Here’s what he had to say:

SF Weekly: Have you heard from Jimmy [Iovine]?
[Homme recently told a blogger that his label Interscope and its head Jimmy Iovine could suck his dick for being wasteful, backward luddites. He chided Iovine for taking private jets and flying first class to tell a band they're going to get no tour support. He called them retarded children. It was epic.]
Josh Homme: I actually heard the other day that he was upset a little bit, but I’m still standing over here feeling that I don’t give a shit. I didn’t say anything that I didn’t believe to be 100 percent true. An hour after I did the interview, Interscope wanted to talk to me about it. “Do you have to name names? Do you have to be so explicit?” And I said, “That’s the problem, you just don’t listen. If you’d listen you’d know that the details of it is what’s important.”
I’m not- I actually read that interview. I don’t read my own interviews, ‘cus it’s not really needed. The only thing I wish it would have said is, ‘this interview was conducted while giggling and laughing the whole time.’